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Jaws: a love story
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Kemp, Morgan Markley; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Jim Zimpel
Approximately 100 million sharks are killed per year due to finning, fishing, and beauty industries. The destruction of a critical apex predator has been overlooked due to a lack of empathy for the venerable creature. This is due to the negative impacts from the film Jaws and the subsequent rise in fear mongering media that has created a false persona that sharks are blood-thirsty man-eating monsters meant to be feared and worthy of defeat. In order to generate positive change to save sharks, the populations perception of what sharks are must be changed. By creating a body of artwork inspired by the true beauty of sharks, fearful opinions of sharks can be exchanged for respect and admiration. Subtilities of the atrocities afflicting sharks can be introduced in a palatable way resulting in empathy that can enact real change for shark conservation.
Prairie gothic
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Hedge, Kristen Marie; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Jeremy Hatch
Prairie Gothic is my understanding of how I have been shaped by experiences of grief and mourning, informed by aesthetics of the Midwest and Western landscape. My research is based on mourning adornment and dress from the Victorian period (approx. 1820-1914), and its impact on Midwest and Western American culture from the perspective of the working class. As the customs surrounding mourning were extravagant in every way, the typical working-class person could not afford to express their love and mourn with gold, diamonds and silk. The objects I have come across in my research express a kind of sentimentality that allows people to express and contain their grief in these objects as a form of art. Everyday materials that are typically overlooked can become reliquaries containing memories and information about the deceased. It is these materials that I used in my work to highlight the importance of family and love.
Alone in the West with a portrait of art history
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Krause, Nicholas O'Brien; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Rollin Beamish
How do we find our place in the historical narrative of art on the vast continuum of human creativity? Art is a reflection and director of culture that embodies historic movements and fundamental principles that enable us to see a continuity and a relationship to humanity over the centuries. To understand our place in the historical canon we must reflect on the past to evaluate our current situation. We draw from the past to inform our understanding of art and culture to take responsibility for the direction of art in the future. To do this we must find a relationship to the aesthetics of historical, cultural movements and investigate the ideas and processes of different ages, to see how we can relate to them, and figure out how to represent the expanding collection of culture and art going forward.
None of it is true, all of it is real
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Godfrey, Tiana Alyse; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Rollin Beamish
Truth relies on objectivity, but we are not capable of objectivity. In contrast, reality is subjective. With this in mind, I begin with the position that truth cannot be understood as anything other than a person's reality. In other words, objectivity can only be experienced subjectively. Through my art, I try to explore the objective subjective and subjective objective, and play with this paradox. For this thesis, I specifically discuss how I believe I have found an interesting paradoxical playground through painting an immediate image of what is credibly an objective place, while being cognizant of what felt true to me within that shared place.
"Inter duas metas": urban memory and monumental transformation on the Vatican plain
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Reinhardt, Margaret Cecile; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Regina Gee; Melissa Ragain (co-chair)
During the Middle Ages, four funerary monuments in an area known today as the Borgo underwent a syncretic transformation of memory. These monuments are the Vatican Obelisk, Meta Romuli, Terebinth of Nero, and Mausoleum of Hadrian. All four were erected during the Imperial period, between the first-century BCE and the second-century AD. This thesis groups these four funerary monuments into a funerary program that shapes the historical narrative of the Vatican plain. They were established during the early Imperial period under a funerary precedent and contributed to the religious development of Rome into a Christian city after Saint Peter was martyred in Vaticanum during the first century. As a funerary program, they contributed to a shift in Rome's power dynamic as the religious narrative of the Empire changed from polytheistic to Christian during the Middle Ages. By analyzing these monuments' identities, architectural framework, historical progression and topographical connections, this study aims to explore how their legacy has been preserved and integrated within the ager Vaticanus from the Roman Empire through the Renaissance.
Chathamesque: Russell Chatham's Montana vernacular
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Bishop, Storrs Myron, IV; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa Ragain
Painter and lithographer Russell Chatham introduced a Tonalist aesthetic to Montana's art scene in the 1970s, making way for a new aesthetic relationship between humans and nature. His work is recognizable by its gray-and-brown palette, horizontally structured compositions, and his signature envelope of atmospheric haze. When Chatham depicted a scene with fog, snowfall or rain obscuring parts of the landscape, he evoked a quiet mood conducive to introspection. People familiar with his work, especially those living in rural Park County, Montana, might look out their window and call the view, "Chathamesque." This term--along with other commonplace statements like, "It's a Russell Chatham kind of day"--became tightly bound to his artistic style and public identity. In contrast to the romanticized mythology of C.M. Russell's Old West, or the sublime grandeur of Thomas Moran's panoramic landscapes, Chatham offered a depiction of the intermountain West as a place for private, transcendental intimacy with nature. This thesis will analyze two series of Chatham's works he created in the 1980s: The Seasons, a series of twelve paintings commissioned by the Museum of the Rockies (MOR) in 1990, and The Missouri Headwaters Suite, twelve lithographs he made between 1985 and 1987. Through three stages of comparative analysis of his paintings and lithographs, this paper will trace Chatham's aesthetic development from conventional California Tonalism toward his transcendental Montana landscapes. The first stage connects Chatham's style to the nineteenth century's California Tonalist movement and its Transcendentalist relationship with nature. The second stage traces his struggle and resolution with interpreting Montana's mountainous landscape. The third stage ties his development as a lithographer to the establishment of his aesthetic vernacular. Each of these stages was another step toward a distinctive style which came to be uniquely identified with Russell Chatham. By the early 1990s, his local audiences had internalized his approach to landscape, and the term "Chathamesque" became a vernacular way of expressing their relationship with Montana's changeable appearance.
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926): advising against convention
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2022) Hanger, Paige McCarthy; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa Ragain
American artist, Mary Cassatt became an advisor when she joined the Impressionists and by the 1890s, she as a celebrated advisor, who worked with elite Gilded Age collectors like the Havemeyer's of New York, the Palmers of Chicago, the Sears of Boston, and others. Anchored in market-based and epistolary research, this thesis will examine Cassatt's advising career and her graphic work. Cassatt taught her clients to value artworks that included both stylistic elements comfortable to American taste and unfamiliar modernist tropes. As an advisor, Cassatt educated her clients to acquire works which were hybrid in nature and borrowed stylistic qualities from accepted artwork and from modernist esthetics. The addition of these in-between works to American collections primed American taste to incrementally accept modernism, realism, and the avant-garde into Gilded Age collections. Cassatt's impact on her clients' collections shaped American collecting habits and the collections of American national museums.
Beyond Afro-Cubism: Aaron Douglas's impressionist landscapes
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2023) Coleman, Martin A.; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa Ragain and Regina Gee (co-chair)
Aaron Douglas often opted for styles, other than his signature afro-cubism, in his personal, private works. Like his more public works, these also served his lifelong socio-political agenda. Art historian, Amy Kirschke opined in 'Aaron Douglas: Art, Race and the Harlem Renaissance' (1994) that the paintings Douglas produced in the last forty years of his life were "less original" and implicitly less political. Through a rigorous analysis of motifs common to Douglas's works, the author argues that Douglas is stylistically agnostic but consistently political, regardless of which style he was using. To understand the political content of his later works, one must understand the significance of locales he depicted, reading of his letters and lectures closely. Douglas was consistent in his use of visual narrative, especially themes of : a proud ancient African past; a recognition of the unequal treatment from white America; African Americans' contribution to modern economic life; and a vision for a more hopeful future assured by Judeo-Christian narratives of escape from bondage. While Douglas most closely associated with his signature afro-cubist style, developed in his illustrations and murals, these were largely commissioned projects. They were also more graphic in nature as opposed to naturalistic. Douglas, throughout his life, and often concurrent with his illustrations and murals, painted impressionist landscapes as well as portraits that were more academic in their rendering. This thesis argues that the fact that this is not recognized by the art historical community owes to the fact that Douglas's private works were not purchased by mainstream museums or shown in major galleries, and they were rarely collected by individuals other than those within his community. Hence, his easel works have not enjoyed the visibility of his murals and illustrations, and therefore were rarely the subject of scholarly analysis, public discussion nor preservation.
Microcosmic reveries: Narcissa Thorne's miniature period rooms
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2023) Murdy, Kaitlin Rose; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: T. Lawrence Larkin
Narcissa Thorne's Miniature Period Rooms and miniatures as an object are overlooked within Art History. Miniatures should hold a place within the history of Decorative Arts due to the nature of the original intentions of their creation and display in Western civilization and design. Beyond misconceptions of historical predecessors, miniatures explore a psychoanalytic relationship to the microcosm and displacement of desire within creators, collectors, and viewers of this unique form of decorative art. Previous research on the study of the Thorne Miniature Period rooms and related subjects is sparse to non-existent. Particularly with the subject being relegated to that of an effeminate hobby, rather than a legitimate and complex artform that presents a mode for unique self-expression and opportunities form education and validation. In researching this subject I rely on methods of psychoanalysis and the writings of Susan Stewart, a literary philosopher who speaks extensively on scale and the psyche of the human mind. This is explored after an in-depth histography of miniature forms and understanding of the ideation and fabrication that went into the production of the Thorne Miniature Period Rooms. Contrary to what is often assumed of miniatures as simply toys, in fact the object has been primarily witnessed in largely adult, feminine social spheres. Narcissa Thorne participated in a form of self-expression of her potential desires for control, suspension of time, intellectual exploration and validation by her contemporaries. A form of self-expression that has continued today and has only grown in popularity of viewers, collectors, and creators.
Coda peripheral: perceptual connections between sound expression and visual art
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2023) Moralez, Melanie Dawn; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Sara Mast
Coda Peripheral explores the relationship between visual art and sound-expressions, in correlation with my graduate program artwork. It examines various approaches to differentiate perceptions of visual art from music and sound art. My aim is to reveal ways in which visual artists, including myself, have approached visual and sound art practices, while exploring the relevance of maintaining distinctions in our modern world. In this paper, I reflect upon images from artists who have engaged with sound and/or musical themes in their visual art, as well as images from my graduate art body of work that chronicle my explorations into this subject. The rare condition of chromesthesia hints at a more commonly held, perceptual experience to link concepts of visual art and music. Visual art has become such a broad and ill-defined concept that it has evolved to capture many things, including sound and music. In this thesis, I address several questions on perception and identifying meaning for ourselves: What are the attributes of music that are shared with visual art? How might we challenge perceptual values we place upon artworks? The creation and reception of art is a symbiotic cycle. Examining these concepts has led me to question how I might respond through my art.

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